The Trials of a Linux Geek

May 27, 2012

Unsure of the cause, but OS X 10.7.4 has been a wash. Not only is MainStage horribly broken under it, so is QuickTime (and it seems anything else that uses the QuickTime libraries, for that matter), along with the screensaver engine. Due to this, a) I've downgraded to 10.7.3 and b) trying to find a way to block the update for now until I can confirm that the issues I saw are resolved. Apple dropped the ball on this one, in my opinion.....

May 11, 2012

Real life kicked in and side tracked me a couple days (along with having to reinstall my iMac to fix broken beta updates from Apple....) All that done, I got the VM instance of the build server running again, and have written a couple scripts to simplify some mundane tasks needed for builds.

As my boss hasn't cleared a maintenance to occur at work, I'll be able to spend a bit of time this weekend getting closer to the point of being able to have all of the "core" OS build dependencies finished before building RPM and then rebuilding everything again, but this time as packages. This will also help determine whether some of the tools are fully self-hosting.

April 29, 2012

Most of the circular dependencies for the new build root are done, only a couple remain before I can start rebuilding various low level libraries to add support for LDAP and Kerberos. Happily, GCC 4.7.0 seems far less broken than the 4.5.1 and before releases (read that as less patching to core libraries to make build....) Soon we'll start reviewing the init options, and such for "suitability".

April 27, 2012

Some know I've been working off and on in my time on a new Linux distribution, and today I decided to start writing up the process to allow better feedback as I work on the software and packages involved, and better
show what goes into building a new flavour of distribution. To start, I guess I should cover what my goals with this are:

Home and Business User-centric: This means that I'll be forgoing a number of UNIX-isms in favour of user needs and wants. While the power of the GNU project's tools, KDE, and other free/open source tools are the
building blocks of AltimatOS, the intent is to allow the average accountant, secretary, high school student, or end-user to easily use their computer without getting in their way, or exposing them to archaic
command-line prompts to do normal tasks.

Desktop oriented: AltimatOS is not, and never will be a server platform. While the underside of the operating system is based on similar software as other GNU/Linux distributions, AltimatOS' design and filesystem
layout are not targeted at the duties of acting as a high performance server.

Not another "Linux": AltimatOS is not another GNU/Linux distribution in that the normal GNU/Linux distributions mostly adhere to filesystem layouts and design philosophies that run counter to good end-user desktop
and corporate desktop operating system design. AltimatOS aims to avoid many of these design pitfalls that have kept "Linux on the Desktop" from becoming a reality.

With these focuses in mind, here are the immediate goals:

The entire operating system must hide away the command line as much as is possible - This means that by default (unless in debug mode) the system should not expose the command-line heritage of GNU/Linux to the
end-user. (Turn off the virtual consoles, disallow switching from X11 to the other consoles, etc.)

No normal-case configuration settings should require the command line - Printing, file-sharing, hardware configuration, security configuration, and network settings must be done graphically and should not require
jumping to the command line.

Filesystem layout must be simple to navigate - While the FHS and LSB standards are intended on "standardizing" GNU/Linux, they've been largely designed by UNIX engineers, which drive them from being useful to the
typical end user. To this end I'm taking a page out of Apple's play book; AltimatOS will radically restructure the filesystem hierarchy to simplify the user experience. While the traditional filesystem hierarchy
will be preserved with symlinks for some level of compatibility, software explicitly designed for AltimatOS should not rely on these compatibility symlinks.

The compatibility symlinks will be hidden from end-user view. The method by which we do so will be through patches to KDE's KIO and Dolphin to honour our distribution specific named extended file attribute:
user.visibility.

Authentication must be done through the local LDAP and Kerberos services running on the system. The flat file method of authentication inspired from UNIX, while simple is dated and inflexible to extend.

In a central authentication environment, we must support LDAP+Kerberos - Simplifying enterprise integration with standard OpenLDAP and MIT Kerberos on a GNU/Linux server.

System configuration is tightly coupled to the Puppet configuration engine - Software packages and configuration tools must work through the custom Puppet registration on the local system, or a centrally manage
puppet-master.

Today, we've our cross tools tree built, and are currently working on building the initial run-time. This will allow us to completely deviate from the SuSE installation that is acting as the cross build host inside
the VM that is running the builds.

The rationale for using VMware for this is simple, While working on this, I can still have a usable system to use for my day to day until AltimatOS is to a reasonable state to use as my main desktop.

As the weeks roll on, I'll chronicle the work being done and at times may ask questions of my readers to see if you've ideas to make this even better. Thanks for joining me on this ride, comments always welcome.

July 14, 2011

As some know, I work as the senior systems administrator for a company in the southeast SF Bay Area. Recently, we had to move to a new security system, after having been broken into four times in the last _four_ years.

One of the features of this new system is that it ties into our phone system to alert the building that the alarm is about to be armed. To do this, a dial out to a special phone number needs to occur at the desired hour and then voila! Instant Alert throughout our suite! So, we've setup an email to fax service that we can easily trigger by a simple email.

So I wrote a REALLY simple shell script shown below (with the fax and email addresses elided):

From there I setup my crontab on one of the Linux box in my cube to have it go off at the apropriote time, 7:55PM Monday through Friday:

MAILTO=SOMERANDOMSMUCK@minervanetworks.com

50 19 * * 1-5 /usr/bin/securityfax.sh

Tested out the script, thinking that "Hey, I'm all done". Wrong.

I come to find out that Vixie Cron can't seem to tell time! I get the alert emails at 8:31PM from the system!

At this point, looks like I'll be replacing Vixie Cron on my workstation (CentOS 5). Can anyone advise a good Cron Daemon replacement that has enough similarities to vixie cron that I won't have to relearn too much and can actually interpret time settings in the crontab as more than mere suggestions?

February 11, 2011

So, most of you who read my blog know about Nokia's deal with Microsoft. To re-iterate the best image posting I've seen on planetkde via John Layt's blog: Keep Calm and Carry On.

Yes, Microsoft has been a major negative force on computing, especially with regards to the freedoms of end users. This however does not warrant the extreme and in many ways self-defeating knee-jerk reactions that have been permeating the Interwebs oft lately on the F/OSS blogs.

Lets rather, take a wait and see approach to this. There really isn't enough information on the ground at this point in the game to know what is or is not going to occur in the immediate or even long-term for Qt Development Frameworks at Nokia. Lets trust in our friends at Nokia to gather up the information that the community is craving to know and get it ready for public consumption.

October 13, 2009

Lately I've been doing research to get an Exchange resource working and usable for KDE. During this time, I've had to have a working trunk build since OpenSuSE's Build Service tends to have custom patches for their build of KDE that make some things not behave or look how the default KDE trunk tree acts/looks (that's not a comment that that's bad, just not my want for when I do development, but I digress...)

To facilitate this, I'd been using the shell scripts that KDE has on Techbase and on the OpenSuSE wiki to build trunk. I've found however, that my time would be better spent working on code, instead of waiting on code to compile when at home. Since I wanted something that would even fully track Qt's Git tree and email me when builds ran or error-ed out, kdesvn-build was not going to meet my needs. What came out of it was a hacky little Perl script called KDEBuilder that was fairly fragile and frankly not designed at all.

While thinking over the mess that was KDEBuilder, I realized that what I *really* wanted was something that was flexible, feature rich, and wasn't an overblown ported shell script on steroids. Out of this came the design for Direktor, a continuous build system written in a clean Perl code style (heavily influenced by the Google Perl Style guide....) To better describe Direktor, I've pasted the ReadMe.txt from the source tree below:

DOCUMENTATION FOR DIRECTOR:

Direktor is a continuous build system primarily meant for use by the KDE open source project. The goal was to create a system that built KDE and it's various dependencies efficiently and allowed the user to be notified and to monitor the progress of the builds.

To achieve these goals, Direktor can be configured to e-mail out the build announcements and build failures. This is augmented by the HTML data that is generated to create a dashboard for the build.

DESIGN:Originally, Direktor was only a simple Perl script that would naively build KDE trunk and announce simple e-mailed snippets to an email address. This became fairly ungainly as time went on with the need to add in Qt4 to the build. This is when it became obvious that the build methods needed to be more abstracted away to allow any software (including KDE's base dependencies if so desired) to be built with this system.

To facilitate this, Direktor was re-factored to use description files to detail various aspects about the build and source control system per module or project. These description files are nothing more than INI files with required entries to make the system work.

As can be seen, this allows the system to be very versatile with builds allowing one to build any package. The configuration_command, build_command, and install_command options allow can be any conceivable valid Linux command, evenscripts.

The fields in a direktor file are required. Lets review the fields and their format:

# Direktor 1.0This is the description and format version of a description file as used by this application.

name:This is an arbitrary string value. It is mainly used to present information about the module to the user.

repository_type:This is a string value that takes one of the following values: svn, git, file, cvs, or p4. This tells Direktor which type of repository the module lives in. The file option tells Direktor that the source is not in a revision control system, but rather is a release tar.bz2, tar.gz, tgz, or zip archive.

in_source_build:This attribute takes either a TRUE or FALSE. This boolean value tells Direktor to build the binaries from within or outside the source directory. Increasingly, many of the open source applications are built outside the source directory.

source_repository:This is the location of the source repository or the full path location of the archive that contains the sources of the project to build.

source_directory:This is the location where the unpacked or checked out files will be placed on the local hard disk.

prefix:This is the prefix where the resultant binaries will be installed to.

configuration_flags:These are the flags to pass to the script or application called to configure the source tree for compilation.

environment:This describes the environment variables and values that must be set to allow the build of the source code to complete correctly. These are placed one per line with the continuation character being the forward slash.

configuration_command:This tells Direktor what command or script to run in the source directory to configure the source code for compilation.

build_command:This tells Direktor what command or script to run from the build directory to compile the source code into binary object and executable code.

build_flags:This instructs Direktor to use the requested flags with the command to build the source tree. In many cases, this is to instruct the compiler to use non-standard library or header locations, or to do the build in parallel allowing the job to complete faster.

install_command:This instructs Direktor what command or script to run from the build directory to install the resultant binaries produced in to the prefix earlier specified.

Note that any time an environment variable is requested that has a dollar sign in it must be escaped to properly be interpolated by the shell that is invoked by Direktor.

REGISTERING MODULES:To register the modules, simply add the module direktor file names without the .direktor extension to the .direktor.modules_registry located in the build user's home directory. The header line declares the major series of Direktor that can read this format. An example .direktor.modules_registry follows:

WORK FLOW:When Direktor starts, it clears the current environment and then sets up the global parameters defined in it's configuration stored in the home directory of the user running the build. This file is called $HOME/.direktor.cfg, and is in an extended INI format.

Once the global configuration is loaded, Direktor checks whether it was started in interactive or daemon mode. Once the execution mode is determined and acted on, Direktor scans the modules_registry to see which modules it needs to retrieve and build.

After it knows which targets to build, it loads the .direktor file for the given target in. Then it announces the start of the first target to the pre-defined E-Mail address and acts on the required options accordingly by setting up the additional environment needed for the compilation of the sources in this target, checking out or downloading the sources to the local disk and unpacking it if needs be to the source directory, configuring the sources, running the build command for the source target, and then installing it into a predefined prefix. Along the way, if any of the steps fail, an E-Mail announcement is sent out to notify the user building the code that the build has failed.

While this is all going on, Direktor will generate HTML pages to display the current status of the builds, including whether a build is running, the target's build completion status (success or failure), and when the build is done, what warnings were output during the compilation.

If the compile fails, the compilation log is displayed back to the last successful portion of the configuration, build, or installation.

CONTINUOUS BUILDS:The most significant feature of Direktor is it's ability to run automatic and prescheduled builds with user specified actions. The two modes of this allow it to be used for continuous build assurance allowing projects to assure that all commits to a branch that is monitored to always build.

The first method, using the watcher system, requires that a post-commit action be set on your source control system to notify Direktor when a check-in has occurred which is delivered to a selected address configured for retrieval by a fetchmail-alike and then processed by procmail, or similar application. During the processing by procmail, the message is piped to our watcher script which then asks the scheduler to start a build as soon as the current server is idle and sends an email notification to a selected e-mail address that a commit to one of the modules has caused a new build to be queued. This very literally will on very active repositories cause the build to always be queued, so be sure that is truly the desired outcome.

The second method kicks off builds at predetermined clock times. The schedule is re-read every 15 minutes to add newly desired times that may have been added to the specified configuration file. Note that no two builds can run at the same time, so be sure that the schedule is long enough to accommodate the completion of all builds.

October 2, 2009

What has two homes on either side of the planet, attracts geeks by the storm, and the letter Q?

No, not a rabid Qbert collector, rather Qt Dev Days!

This year, to start things out right we've managed to acquire through the clandestine (ok, maybe not so much....) work of the Nokia Qt Development Frameworks division (formerly known as Trolltech) F/OSS Community Manager, Knut Yrvin, a small stash of passes for KDE developers to the event. We thought what better way to draw in interested KDE developers than to hold a pre-Qt Dev Days Sprint?!

What will the sprint cover, you might ask? Well, we're interested in hearing (hopefully sooner than later) what YOU, the KDE hacker wants to work on/brainstorm on at this sprint! To better get an idea of whom will or will not be coming, please stop by our Facebook event page and RSVP. If you choose not to use FB to let us know, feel free to leave a blurb on my blog. Thanks :D

The last couple days, the OpenChange project's website has fallen off the 'Net. As one of the steps in getting my development environment up is installing libmapi++ (which no distribution seems to have packaged at all), I'm stuck. If anyone knows the folks maintaining the OpenChange project's website, please find out what is going on. Also, if anyone has a current check-out of the libmapi++ tree, please let me know so I can get it from you. Thanks.